A few days ago there was some complaint from Climate Camp that there was a lack of mobile phone connectivity. There’s three reasons this can happen, in descending order of likeliness – the current cell is running at capacity, part of the network has gone down, a new fake base station has been introduced. The most interesting reason is the latter, so let’s explore that a little.

According to the GSM specifications, communications between the mobile and the current base unit are generally (but don’t have to be) encrypted, mobiles are authenticated before being allowed to connect to the network, and mobiles connect to the base station with the most powerful signal. This means that in countries where encryption is illegal, GSM can still be used. It also means that anybody can introduce a fake GSM base station in order to monitor communications, you just bring along a base station from the Iraqi network and make sure that the mobile units can’t communicate with the real base stations.

Needless to say getting your hands on an Iraqi cellular base station is easier said than done, especially where you also need the mobiles to be able to communicate with the outside world, but it’s still possible. It certainly seems to make more sense than trying to get all of the uk mobile networks to give you call records, mms/sms records and recordings of everything.

The much more likely reason there’s been problems making calls is simply that there’s a much larger number of people than usual in a somewhat rural part of the country. It may or may not be assisted by the cops restricting communications to make planning actions difficult, but most likely not.